The Sophisticated man's shitlord

Monthly Archives: July 2018

We did a Red Man Group podcast on “Looks, Money, Game” a few weeks back, it was an interesting podcast to do, given that there wasn’t a real consensus on the panel about which one is the most important, but everyone agrees with the fact that ideally you want at least two of them. The idea for this essay came to me when I was preparing for the podcast by having an internal debate with myself about factors that influence performance in the sexual market place. My internal chain of reasoning was along the lines of various trade-offs we are willing to make when shopping for a sexual partner. My preferences for a woman’s looks are largely centered on breasts, butt, hair and face, but I was asking myself how these four factors interact. In an ideal world, I would prefer a woman with bigger breasts, a bubble butt, long red hair (in a particular shade), and an innocent looking yet pretty face. I also tend to prefer either green or blue eyes, over other colors.

So, in my head I constructed somewhat of a March Madness bracket for these various characteristics and had them play against each other, mostly out of curiosity. This lead me to figure out which characteristics are soft-preferences, which are hard preferences and which are somewhere in the middle. As I worked myself through this, I found myself thinking about preferences, choice and options because these are closely linked. This lead down a rabbit hole of considerations on sexual market pricing, preferences and trades, that then lead down a fairly long string of thinking on building the optimal sexual market performer. While doing this, I ran across the Apex Fallacy and the nadir fallacy.

An apex fallacy is a conditional fallacy which happens when one evaluates how good a group is doing by the highest performing members. The converse fallacy is called the nadir fallacy, which is when one evaluates a group based on the worst members. I’m going to be using these with a slightly different definition in this essay, where the definition will be “when one evaluates how good one is doing based on how good other members of multiple groups are doing.”

Philosophy has 5 classical branches, logic, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics and metaphysics, ranked in order of empirical foundation. Logic is the study of reasoning, often divided in deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. The former is drawing general conclusions from specific examples, the latter is drawing logical conclusions from definitions and axioms. Epistemology is concerned with the nature and limitations of knowledge, and deals with four points, what is knowledge, how is knowledge acquired, what do people know, and how do we know what we know. Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and ugliness, and is sometimes referred to as the study of sentiment and taste.

Ethics is also known as moral philosophy, it’s the branch of philosophy concerned with good and bad, right and wrong, justice, virtue and all related concepts. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of existence, and seeks to explain the fundamental nature of being and the world. Traditionally, metaphysics is divided into two branches, cosmology and ontology. The former seeks to understand the origin, evolution, structure and ultimate fate of the universe at large and the natural laws that govern it. These days this branch of philosophy is soundly placed within the STEM field. The latter, ontology deals with questions concerning which entities exist or can be said to exist, how such entitled can be grouped, organized in hierarchies, this has also been placed distinctly within the realm of science and is now empirical. After the schism that created the gap between “philosophy” and “natural philosophy (later science), metaphysics is largely concerned with the philosophical inquiry of a non-empirical character into the nature of existence.

Some people are also inclined to include political philosophy into the classical branches, this is a branch concerned with the study of concepts such as liberty, justice, property rights, law and the enforcement of a legal code by authorities, what they are, if they are needed, and many such questions. The major focus of this essay is not concerned with political philosophy, thought it is tangentially relevant to the topic, the major focus of this essay will be on logic, epistemology, ethics and the present definition of metaphysics.

The early days of the Red Pill was known as “The Seduction Community” and was concerned with investigating how men could become more successful at sexual relationships with women. For this purpose, the early pick-up artists would study men who were naturally good at getting laid, formulate theories for what these men did, test those theories through field-experiments and report the results back in field-reports in various online communities, so that other men could test if it also worked for them. The development of this body of knowledge is not much different from the development of bodybuilding or strength training where the practitioners have often been well ahead of the scientific community with their prescriptions. This became known as “bro-science” which was a derogatory term for knowledge a person obtained through practice, that would vary in its efficacy, mostly due to a lack of ability to control for important variables such as nutrition and drug use, but also due to sample problems such as using small samples (n=1) or selections of extreme outliers.

From day one the most important factor in game and red pill theory is the structure of “What do we observe”, “Why does it work” and “How can this be practically applied”. The explanation and theory only serves a purpose in how it influences practice. “Cocky & Funny”, “DHV”, “Negs” and “False disqualifiers” are all under the umbrella of “Amused Mastery”, when practitioners identified the former, deductive reasoning allowed Rollo to go from specific behavioral examples to a general conclusion and thus theory [1].

There has been a push recently to include metaphysics (by definition 3) and ethics in red pill theory as of late, and I’ve written a bit here to illustrate on why I think that this is a questionable idea.

An interesting digression on Red Man Group in the past few weeks was the discussion the role of women in the red pill sphere. I’ve somewhat taken a “I don’t care that much” position on the topic, however we do have some data-points on what happens when women enter male spaces. At first their desire is just to be included in the dialogue and to contribute, then they start slowly changing the space to become more “female friendly“, which generally means less directness, more speech and behavior policing. The next step is to slowly convert the space from being goal-directed and focused on the task, into a niche sexual market place where they can take a leading position and make it about what women need. We saw a very clear example of this in gaming, where it went from “We just want to play too“, that became “Stop being mean to people who aren’t good at the game“, to “Be less competitive” to “Stop designing all games for men“.

The trouble with women entering male spaces is that it’s impossible for women to not make the space about their perceptions, needs and desires. Any man who has ever had a woman move into his place is aware of this process. It starts with a toothbrush, then a drawer in the dresser, then suddenly there are pillows everywhere, the color scheme is filled with soft pastels, the beer signs are in the garage along with your favorite chair, and you’re not sure where 50 – 80% of your stuff went, and where the stuff that is in your house now came from. What used to be your castle, a place built around your needs, wants and desires, a place to retire when you just wanted to be you for a while, is now…. something else, it has become a feminine space.

The Red Pill is about helping men be better men so that they can be empowered to live the life they desire for themselves. not for other people. This is where the red pill is distinct from other groups that operate in adjacent spaces, to The Red Pill making better men and men who are able to live fulfilling lives on their own terms and according to their own aspirations is an end in itself. The “Trad-con“-sphere utilize many red pill methods to build better men, but their primary goal isn’t to enable men to live the lives they desire, it is to build a tribe for themselves of like-minded men to maintain western civilization and the sanctity of monogamous marriage. Jordan B. Peterson for all his great ideas, isn’t about the men he tells to clean up their rooms and stand up straight, he is about ensuring that they become good husbands and fathers that will maintain order by raising the next generation and thus serve as barriers to chaos.

A Voice For Men and The Good Man project are not about creating better men, in the case of the latter they are about creating better plow-horses, in the case of the former, they are about ensuring that the plow horses are fed, get to see a vet once in a while and can stay in the stable when it rains. The Red Pill doesn’t care if you just want to give your dead bedroom marriage CPR or whether you want to lay more pipe across pristine Eastern European territories than Gazprom, that part is up to you.

Now, I think women can serve a purpose in the red pill, some are great case studies for the concepts of hypergamy, solipsism, the timeline of female sexual market value and many other things. Women who are able to maintain long-term relationships with high value males can serve as examples to other women of what is required to do so. Some women make great cautionary tales for younger women, about what happens when you fall victim to the grass-is-greener fallacy. However, we must always be mindful of the simple fact that for women a man will always be a means to her end, not an end in himself. Continue reading →